When not in hospital, we suggest people need mental stimulation, exercise, good food and daylight to stay healthy and sane. None of these things are possible when you're convalescing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm _very_ thankful for the fact I still have both my legs, but staying sane is extremely difficult.
Half of the bays on my ward literally had no windows. There were people around me that hadn't seen daylight in over a month.
There wasn't any publicly accessible free WiFi, the TVs were costing over £40/week. There's no library, no social spaces and absolutely nothing to do. Even the staff are too busy to have a conversation with.
You had two meals served 6 hours apart. It wasn't awful but certainly wasn't great. Even buying and eating a lot of my own food left me loosing a tonne of weight.
And not a single accessible gym or swimming pool even close. Being able to get healthy and fit seems like a no-brainer.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good, but I find it impossible to believe this isn't causing more problems and actually increasing recovery times costing them more money over-all.
Where is this? In the US I’ve never seen a hospital without windows and free tv. Although gyms are different, likely because if you are healthy enough to hit the gym you are healthy enough to go home.
Although one thing that always stood out is no one is expected to sleep in a hospital. A nurse or doctor will likely be in every few hours doing something to wake you up. And in between there will always be noise from the hall.
Bear in mind some of the buildings still in use are ancient - the oldest part of of the hospital was opened 1860 and is still in use. It's also had rooms re-purposed from things like storage and kitchens to actual wards.
The TV thing is infuriating. Apparently our government decided that the NHS should not front the cost of entertainment (which kinda makes sense) but instead we now have for-profit companies screwing over the vulnerable instead. It seems entirely wrong.
> Although gyms are different, likely because if you are healthy enough to hit the gym you are healthy enough to go home.
This really isn't true. Just because someone has broken their arm doesn't mean they're not capable of 30 minutes cycling on a static bike. Just because I was on IV antibiotics 6 times a day didn't mean I couldn't have burnt off some energy in a safe and healthy way.
The lack of sleep _is_ crazy, but even more so the insistence that you should go to bed and wake up early. "ooh, all you do is sleep all day!" - well yes. because my other alternative is sitting in a chair staring at a wall all day (and anyway, I covered 8 miles on crutches last night).
"if you are healthy enough to hit the gym you are healthy enough to go home."
Not everyone is in the hospital as a patient and not every patient is in the hospital for something very dire. For example, I was in the hospital for 3 days once getting IV steroids. In between doses and things like blood sugar checks, I had no need to stick around the hospital bed. I truly could have happily and safely walked on a treadmill, for example. This was before most hospitals here had wifi, though, and would have been better than being bored.
A few months ago, I was in observation for 6 or so hours due to a medication I was starting. I had a portable heart monitor, and really simply needed hourly blood pressure and pulse checks along with simple access to hospital staff. At one point, my pulse was low and I needed - for my own health - to be active. Luckily, I simply walked around outside, stopped at the kiosk (gas station without the gas), and was back before my next check.
I'm sure there are slews of other situations that one needs to be in a hospital, but not necessarily confined to a hospital bed.
GP isn't wrong though, if you're well enough to go work out at the gym you don't need to be in a hospital taking up very expensive limited bed space. Treatment for a very sick people is often done outpatient or in non-hospital skilled nursing or residential facilities. Not looking sick doesn't factor in here.
I'm assuming GGP was not referring to physical therapy facilities however, some hospital inpatients do require that.
There are a number of reasons people are kept in hospital and their ability to exercise may or may not factor into this.
I spent 10 weeks as an inpatient on 6* daily IV antibiotics (which would have been impossible to do at home) to treat a serious infection in the bone in my foot. On some of my better days I managed to cover nearly 10 miles on crutches or in a wheelchair. Being able to use a gym to work out would have been better and substantially safer all round.
On the flipside, it's amazing how many doors one can get through using nothing but a lollypop-stick from the ice-cream machine in reception or a pair of crutches to open gates from the other side. And technically the "no public access" signs don't apply because you're not public, you're an in-patient at that point... but there has to be better ways of staying fit and sane that would apply to the other 99.9% of patients.
Can you shed insight on why the acceptance of the NHS is like a religion or seemingly tied to national identity so much?
Modification or criticism of NHS seems like an off limits topic with UK residents, and it just seems like a weird topic to be off limits so I don't really understand
> What we don't like is any talk of Americanising the NHS
The difficulty is that "Americanisation" is this catch all term (Along with Neoliberalism etc.) that doesn't have a defined meaning, but is wide enough to beat any non-left wing solution into the ground. I don't think anyone actually wants the NHS to be more american, but most european healthcare systems have more in common with American one's than ours to some degree (Excluding universality, which it obviously lacks)
Imagine if the Orange Book was released now, with it's plans to introduce insurance to the NHS: I can picture the momentum activists screaming now.
I think it is partially due to the fact that the establishment of the NHS has always been framed as a monumental act. It's creation is seen as part of the country's recovery after WW2, and has been used as a political tool in almost every General Election since 1945. I think people see it as a source of national pride as well (there's some irony in this considering the significant role played by immigrants in the service). Certainly from my point of view, Britain has an extremely questionable history, and for me it feels wrong to have a sense of national pride about the British Empire, or British Military Might etc. However, the NHS is a remarkable organisation which is inherently tied to an ideology and a movement which I believe in, so I am comfortable with feeling proud of it.
I do think that it needs to be open to criticism, though. There are issues in the NHS and I'm sure there are problems with the way that National Insurance works (our way of paying for the NHS). I have unfortunately had a lot of exposure to the NHS and the way some things work is frustrating. For example, I am unable to get an insulin pump to treat my Diabetes because there are national requirements that I do not meet. I undertstand why this is in place (budget cuts) but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating - I'd essentially have to sabotage my condition to the point where my control was so bad that I would qualify for a pump.
Like the other commenter said, I think what most people hear when people talk of reforming the NHS is an Americanisation of the NHS, and they believe this is inherently bad. Rightly or wrongly, that is the impression that people get. It's a shame because I think it shuts down all talk of reformation, despite the fact that there are other European countries which also have socialised healthcare but operate in different ways which I have heard are more efficient. I haven't done enough research into this to really provide any helpful comparisons, but if anyone has any information or links which explore the funding and service provision of other socialised health care provision in contrast with the UK, I'd love to have a read.
The NHS is a sacred cow of British politics and in my experience of talking to people both online and in person, most people have absolutely no idea how it compares to alternative systems.
Very few people realise, for example, that there are very few healthcare systems in Europe organised like the NHS yet most deliver better results. However, "insurance" is a dirty word because it's associated with American Healthcare rather than continental Europe.
7 countries spend more than healthcare (% of GDP) than us, but 17 score better on the EHCI (Euro Health Consumer Index) and 17 have longer life expectancies.
It's also not viable politically (debate around the NHS, that is) because the Labour party is currently being run by it's socialist faction e.g. Some of Corbyn's lieutenants are proper marxists.
tl;dr it sounds like a religion because it is a religion to most
> Although gyms are different, likely because if you are healthy enough to hit the gym you are healthy enough to go home.
St. Thomas' in London (UK) has a gym for patients that need to do phisyotherapy exercises. I don't recall treadmills or squat racks, but they had medicine balls, free weights, instructors, music, and so on.
Yeah I've had so many family members in hospitals over the years and these are always the most nerve-wracking, depressing places. And I'm in a "first-world" region with one of the highest costs of living in the world.
I think the worst is the nightmarish greenish-yellow hue due to the combination of cheap fluorescent lighting and "neutral" (light green) furniture/wall colors. One step in there and you just know there's probably someone dying somewhere nearby. It sounds sensationalistic to say, but man I always feel this sense of dread immediately.
There are newer/nicer places that _don't_ create this feeling right away, and the difference for me is night and day. Even though all the same stuff happens, the atmosphere is so different and doesn't trigger this primal dread.
That sounds awful. I'm thankful that all the hospital's I've been to in the US are the complete opposite experience, with the exception of the successful recovery.
I'm assuming you're in the UK? The hospitals I've used in London had plenty of art in corridors, but not in the wards. They also had a library of sorts: a bookshelf on wheels that the volunteers could bring round on request. They also had free WiFi that clashed somewhat with the signs warning not to use mobile phones. The built in pay TV and phone was ghastly though - I assume its to price gouge old patients as everyone else I saw was using their own device.
Before everyone piles in with their opinion, has anyone actually found the research mentioned in this article? I've searched quite thoroughly, but I can't find any sign that it has actually been published anywhere. I did find the paper from 2004 and was not impressed.
This [1] at least has an reference section, but most of the actual research listed is based on audio not visual.
I suspect that this article is an advertisement for Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s new book, The Healing Arts which is available from Unicorn Publishing Group. I get the feeling any data, if available, is in the book.
I spent a lot of time in Chelsea and Westminster and it's not a very nice hospital.
The burns unit was clean, bright and airy. But there were limited activity available because of infection control reasons, and the layout of the hospital was hostile to physical activity. Using the stairs was hard, all the signs and designs pushed you to the elevators. And those had been programmed incorrectly so they took an age to arrive and the to get you to your floor.
As far as built environments for burns units go it was better than Birmingham Shelly Oak (Victorian building, excellent care because military connection), better than Bristol Frenchay (awful care, I think they've knocked it down now), but not as good as Salisbury (better layout, good care).
This is a severe problem for the NHS: The amount of estate that's just terrible is surprising.
Indeed not, and I am EXTREMELY skeptical of the claim that birth times are reduced TWO HOURS (!!!) by the addition of art. That's the kind of effect you see in papers that get retracted for outright fraud, let alone dubious and irreproducible studies.
Unblinded (somewhat unavoidable), informal randomisation, n=26, the sole author is an interior designer with no scientific training. Paper states an "average" difference in birth times of 2.1 hours (not clear if mean or median), no SDs or p-value stated. Published in Optics & Laser Technology for some reason; the editorial board appears to be entirely comprised of engineers.
On the plus side, at the very least the same hospital and hospital rooms were used. I initially assumed they were comparing an expensive, spacious upper-class hospital full of art with a run-down brutalist Medicaid hospital, and conflating sampling bias with causality.
"A screen was designed to hide emergency equipment with the joint aim of reducing women's anxieties and (through visual art) acting as a focal point of attention and distraction during labour, thus diminishing requirements for analgesia. Results demonstrated, in the presence of the screen, a statistically significant shortening of the duration of labour by 2.1h"
Uh, I don't have access to the full article, but was the control hiding the equipment with a blank screen or no screen at all?
Cause if the control was no screen at all, I don't think they were testing what they say they were testing:
"The significant clinical outcomes of this research provide the evidence of the value of integrating visual art into the environment of a labour and delivery room, improving the quality of the maternity service and potentially delivering real cost savings benefits to Hospitals."
I tried, and could not. And I’m baseline a little skeptical because the NHS has a history of pushing very poorly designed fad research precisely like this.
I have been working in some fast-growing software companies. Every few years, we change office and get one in a better place, with new furniture, fancier each time, tv monitor is everywhere, each wall had pictures and was colourful.
I had to go to the hospital, nothing serious. It was so extremely sad to see 30-40 years old furniture, dark rooms that had never been re-painted, power outlets had been refurbished for the new European type. There was a sign that said, "Do not leave weelchears in this zone". Of course, there were wheelchairs as they did not have space anywhere else.
It felt so completely wrong. Are we, as a society, investing in the right things? Austerity in Spain means that there is no money for hospitals, education, etc. Anything that is not live-and-dead is a luxury. Meanwhile, those companies, all registered in tax havens like Malta or Ireland, had money to spend in fancy breakfast, new furniture every few years, unused monitors in every wall, ...
We know that to go to a hospital is a bad experience as you would like to be anywhere else. Why do we make it so much worse? Why we do not invest in life quality?
I know that there are countries where it is worse, I am happy that everyone in the country had free health care. But, it could be much better.
Healthcare has often outpaced GDP growth [1][2], putting a continuous strain on hospitals and other healthcare service providers. This in turn leads to less money being spent on non-essential parts, or at least the ones that are deemed to provide lower ROI for stakeholders (E.g. personnel, patients, family of patients, etc).
It is also worth noting that the trajectory that the company you work for in terms of office change is likely to be an outlier and (in)directly creates an skewed perspective of things, which when brought back to the average environment, creates a 'shock'.
> Are we, as a society, investing in the right things?
This kind of question can be tricky. It biases the answer. The answer is usually "No, but it's hard to agree about what the right things are."
But in a lot of cases, how is as important as how much.. and related. Are we doing this the right way? Are the right people making the right decisions?
A hospital or an industry is also a culture, and they often do things for cultural reasons.
The "fast-growing software companies" have a culture of nice offices. The economic rationale is that it's cheap, helps recruit, and possibly adds to moral or productivity or somesuch.
Hospitals have a utilitarian culture, austere at times. Older culture, more complicated reasons. A lot of the difference (since we're talking about appearances) is down to what they want to project and to whom.
> I know that there are countries where it is worse, I am happy that everyone in the country had free health care. But, it could be much better.
Doctor's offices in the US look nicer than those in Italy, where I lived for a number of years. But ultimately, patients pay for that, and overall the US health care system is reaaaallllly expensive.
See this NPR interview with a healthcare expert from the Kaiser Foundation:
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, why do people get hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills for staying in a hospital?
ROSENTHAL: Well, the first thing I tell people when they ask me this question is to go into your local hospital and look around. And the marble lobbies, the art, the concierges at the front desk - our hospitals look like not five-star hotels - seven-star hotels. I mean, I think the most stark thing when people go overseas is hospitals in Europe, which deliver really high-quality care. They look like junior high schools. You know, they're not fancy, but the care is good.
Living in California I can tell you that there is free parking with valets. You can charge your electric car and the lobby is definitely not looking bad at all. In one hospital, in Washington, there was a super high ceiling with a piano where a musician comes sometimes during the day to play. It's not everywhere like these two examples, but I've seen a couple where the level was way higher than in Canada or Europe.
I've seen some pretty flashy lobbies and interior spaces in Boston (Brigham and Women's) and Providence (Lifespan) where you get the hotel impression. I could not find easy-to-point-at pictures, but there are some littered around (best I can show is http://www.discoverbrigham.org/2017-discover-brigham-photos-... which looks like a convention hall but is actually shot at the hospital). As soon as you get past them though to the functional spaces it usually turns into the traditional easy to clean hallway systems, but some of the lobbies have that marble, high ceiling, hotel lobby kind of look. There are plenty that I have been to that haven't exuded that kind of feeling however (or were an alternate entrance).
Patients are usually an inconvenience to the good running of a healthcare system.
In other words, incentives aren't aligned. The people with the power to make decisions have little or no forces making things better for healthcare consumers, outside of boutique private healthcare.
The Disneyland-like software companies you describe are that way because they must signal success, coolness, etc in order to attract employees to hire, investors to write checks, customers to sign up, etc. In another word, it’s a cost of doing business.
Hospitals (I’m assuming you’re describing public European hospitals) aren’t subject to those pressures - instead, they have to fight for the tiniest bit of budget to replace/fix things that should have been replaced years ago, or to hire enough staff.
If you go to fancy private American hospitals, you will also find that they have the latest TVs/trendy furniture/etc, because they have to signal to wealthy people that they are worth giving their money to.
When you look at how inflated costs are for the latter, I’m not sure it’s a desirable thing.
The mention of Spain reminded me of the Sant Pau hospital, which Domènech i Montaner designed in contrast to typical hospitals with the idea that beautiful places could be more therapeutic. It's a restored UNESCO site now that hosts events rather than patients (it stopped functioning as a hospital a decade ago). It being built 100 years ago, I imagine it may fall short in suitedness for medicine today, but the conversion of beautiful place to museum/event venue aligns a bit with your sentiment.
> Austerity in Spain means that there is no money for hospitals
Sorry where are you getting this information from? I have family in Spain that is expecting to get excellent healthcare from their supplemental health insurance.
It seems likely that the emphasis on judging the aesthetic values of work spaces may itself be the issue, not that our hospitals and other public facing facilities are depressing.
Having spent many months of my life in hospital rooms, even just a brightly colored paint job really makes things feel better. A lot of older hospitals have very sterile, bland colors on the floors and walls that would make even a healthy happy human feel depressed.
Reason for that though: it's easier to see blood and other fluids on a bland / white wall. Since fluids are a common way for infectious diseases to spread, they need to be cleaned thoroughly and completely.
Have you ever looked at a seemingly clean surface with a UV light? It's surprising how much invisible ick there is, and it pops out since it visibly fluoresces. This might be a useful way to see the spills?
Yes, that's another verification tool they use for highly contagious (think HIV / AIDS / HEP-C) patients.
However, those lights are usually handheld and small. Expecting cleaning staff to cover 100% of all walls each time they cleaned it (which is multiple times a day) is prone to failure.
Plus those lights work best when the room is dark. Which means you could only clean it at night.
And some rooms have multiple patients, so now the cleaner people will need to work around them / have them be OK with the room being dark for a while. This can work, but again not every patient will be comfortable with a "crime scene investigation" happening while they recover.
> they need to be cleaned thoroughly and completely
I don't know what hospitals you're going to but the ones in the US don't qualify that statement. Would I say they're filthy? No, but they certainly don't look like they're cleaned often, thoroughly, or completely.
Agreed, pretty much every hospital room I’ve been in has mystery stains on the ceiling. It’s so common that I’d point them out to my family members and we’d wonder out loud what the cause could have been.
Edit: there was even one room where I put on rubber gloves and used the disinfectant wipes from the janitor’s cart to clean dried blood from my IV pole and the bed rails.
That depends to which tier of hospital you go. On the other end, of course, I have a friend who had to get treatment in Italy and was required to bring her own needles. This was in-patient surgery. Also, the nurse tried to re-use them and called her a "wasteful American" when she told her to get a clean one.
>On the other end, of course, I have a friend who had to get treatment in Italy and was required to bring her own needles. This was in-patient surgery. Also, the nurse tried to re-use them and called her a "wasteful American" when she told her to get a clean one.
Oww, come on, that is simply not true, in the last - say - 100 years in Italy (post WW1 emergencies).
So, either your friend is very, very old, or she is making it up for the benefit of folklore.
Until the '60's or maybe early '70's syringes and needles were not "use once and throwaway" but of course they were washed after every use and sterilized before a new use.
The hospital I work at was looking at cost saving measures. Someone realized we were paying $65k a year in art insurance. Generous people would loan the art to the hospital on the condition that the hospital would insure it. When times were good, the hospital had no issue paying for the insurance, but once we had to cut costs, it became clear we couldn't be a free art storage facility for citizens. They inventoried everything, returned pieces that they no longer felt like insuring.
That does sound like a pretty insane recurring cost. Doesn't seem like there's any need for really valuable art that requires insurance when murals, photos and reproductions of the same nice art would do it. Hopefully they just replaced that all with something much cheaper.
I think you could deduce that no pieces would be of substantial value. No one would loan a valuable piece to a hospital knowing that it's likely going to be put in a public hallway and potentially touched or damaged many times a day.
I work at an 1100 bed hospital, the largest in Western Canada. We have 7 buildings on site, which is a lot of square feet. Additionally, when an insurance company sees the government as a client, I'm sure the pricing gets jacked a bit.
There likely weren't any high value paintings seeing as how they would be publicly displayed in a hospital, however, we are a very large hospital, so there were quite a number of pieces. Lots were just in storage as we didn't have anywhere to put them.
The article seems to be describing this as if it's a new idea, but at least in my experience, when you walk through some of the more world class hospitals (The Cleveland Clinic comes to mind), there is clearly a tremendous amount of thought in regards to interior architecture.
High ceilings that damp out sound, generally light and soft colors, soft sounds and diverse art installations.
It's a real shame that when people discuss architecture we largely focus on the exterior of buildings, but truly the craft is about how people move through and experience a space. This is especially relevant in the current era of large glass office towers, which while on the outside tend to seem rather bland, tend to have a far better interior experience than their external one puts on.
I'm curious if this applies to doctor offices too. In Japan, doctor offices are very barebones: small, cramped, and only has enough space for the doctor and one patient.
Since Japan has national health care, they spend the minimum amount necessary to keep these offices operational. So there is no art, no big spaces, no "nice to have" things.
If a patient only spends 15-30 minutes in that environment, will it really impact their stress, anxiety and pain?
The article says its for patients "receiving intrusive examinations, surgery, chemotherapy and emergency care".
So looks like the target of study is high stress cases.
As for cost, no one said you have to install Picasso or brand names. Plenty of local artists could contribute to wall designs, or even contributions from the affiliated hospital university's art department.
They could make a policy change to accept art donations (of paintings, posters, etc), and put them up on the walls. I imagine a lot of people would be happy to donate art for the public good.
We have found that there is a wide variety of styles within healthcare facilities from bland and cold to colorful and vibrant. My gut tells me that decision makers don't try new things for a variety of reasons, with one being that they don't know what the possibilities are that exist.
Articles such as this will hopefully help more people in the right places know what is possible and worth trying.
Is this really what is causing the impact? Or do hospitals that care enough to budget keeping up nice appearances tend to care enough to manage patients' health better as well?
> It also found that 16 out of 19 clinical staff working in the children’s emergency department noted that zoo-themed digital art, showing moving images of animals, improved young patients’ anxiety, while 15 out of 19 clinicians said it decreased their pain.
What I find interesting/odd is that the article focuses on the patients. Yet makes no mention of the art's affect on the doctors and staff
I think it's safe to assume that anything you can do to make the patient feel more comfortable and take their mind away from their situation will help with stress and anxiety.
It's like the dentist chairs with a netflix table above your head. You are less likely to be aware of what's going on in your mouth and be hyper sensitive to the doc's every move if you are distracted by the latest avengers!
How is this news? Every hospital I have been in recently has art on the walls, some lots, some not so much but it's there.
Even the dismally badly designed, and laughably misnamed, Great Western Hospital in Swindon has pictures on the walls, unfortunately few of them are where the patients spend the most time.
A good friend of mine works with an organization in North Carolina called Arts For Life [0]. They set up tables where kids can create art, not just have it on the walls around them.
Pragmatic question: What channels do artists have today to sell art to hospitals?
The average price of paintings or photograph prints are a tiny fraction of what they spend on medical equipment, and if it reduces patient stress, it sounds like an incredibly big win-win.
Articles like this are interesting when compared to what the wealthy are doing with the world’s most inspiring art: keeping them locked away in port boxes to function as wealth management assets.
You would think we could find a way to improve the situation.
After several rounds of kids with hospital stays I really appreciated common spaces with an assortment of furniture where you could take some time to ... not feel like you're in such a serious clinical place.
The art would need to be something neutral or soothing that doesn't evoke strong emotions, something pleasant. I'd suggest Bob Ross style paintings to be the standard.
I was a patient, be in hospital more then two months, i always thought if there was classic music echo in the passage or my room, the pain will be less.
getting sunlight also relieves depression and exercise and eating right will help with weight losss. This are obvoius things but they are not cures within themselves.
Im sure there are tons of things hospitals can do to help the surroundings. Whose going to put up the money?
They should probably qualify what kind of art seems to reduce anxiety. I could line a patient waiting room with H.R. Giger paintings, but that might not achieve the same result:
I would be interested to know if this artwork actually would actually have the same result for certain people, i.e. goths, punks, or other alternative artists.
I would be pretty stoked to see H.R. Giger artwork in any place (I have visited his gallery & cafe!), but I think it might be bad to dwell on it for a long time, since it would probably push you towards thoughts about existential questions and the nature of humanity, things like that. Probably not the best subjects for when you're already anxious about possibly-life-threatening hospital situations, heh.
I bet that those are a smart plan for disclosing terrorists and trafficants of endangered species watching how people reacts to the paintings. There is a lot of children depicted in the murals. There is also a lot of guilt, and emotional themes subtly related with a typical work at an international airport.
Psychological warfare seems the only logical reason for having this paintings near to customs.
Quality meals ... when my dad had his heart surgery his first solid meal was a low quality, high-fat hamburger on a plain white bun (no tomato or lettuce, just ketchup), salad with enough ranch dressing for 4 salads and a plastic container with peaches soaked in syrup (ie. HFCS). I was horrified.
I mentioned it to his cardiologist who, to his credit, went on a rant about how the food seems to be especially chosen to sabotage any work he does.
Perhaps it is more nuanced than that: getting the patient to eat after surgery is probably the most important thing - and perhaps burgers are the way to do that for the majority of patients?
A quick Google of keywords (weight loss after cardiac surgery) shows papers with sentences like "Patients who lost weight faced a significantly increased risk of mortality than those who experienced no changes or gained weight after surgery", and "We conclude that obesity confers a survival advantage in the setting of the CABG surgery", "While various large-scale randomized controlled studies evaluated different post-operative
nutrition strategies in rather mixed cohorts of critically ill patients, only few small clinical studies
specifically investigated its effects in cardiac surgery patients. In these studies, malnutrition has been
reported to increase morbidity and mortality after cardiac surgery".
I agree it is obvious that good food is best, but or hard to know what the actually constraints are. I think it is unlikely the NHS will put on a nice entrecôte de boeuf!
It would be "nuanced" if it was ground chuck on brioche, but it was terrible quality in addition to unhealthy. That's why I was clear it was low quality, crap food; not comfort food.
Which country are you in? The mention of HFCS suggests USA, but [USA based?] companies have pushed that in to a lot of foods in UK now it seems so ...?
Not at all, but there is I understand some subsidy system that favours using corn syrup as a sweetener - and in mass production it can be added to almost any food to make it sweeter.
As USA founded/headquartered companies have taken over more of UK food production it \appears\ that this has been coincident with the increased usage of HFCS to sweeten traditional UK foods. That appearance is so strong that it is a stereotype in UK society "this tastes sickly sweet now, oh yeah, Kraft took over so they probably put corn-syrup in it".
It might just be that as USA capitalism has optimised squeezing more money out of lower quality food by adding cheaper ingredients other countries have optimised for financial profit in the same way?
I've never heard similar issues raised against the food industry of other countries; even so, perhaps it's an unwarranted stereotype?
I'm open if you want to try and change my view?
[Hmm, reading that back it's no longer clear to me what you are saying, I read your post as if the second sentence were a question; apologies if I erred.]
There are superbeneficial (US-IRS) tax laws that let corps shelter money in fine art. Tax advantage is the prime reason you see fine art hanging in office hallways....
Hospitals will have all of those things the moment people are willing to pay for them. Some hospitals have those now - for the sort of hospitals that predominantly serve patients with excellent insurance for high margin activities or who are paying cash. Eg, top tier specialty surgical centers and dedicated cancer centers.
Most patients can’t afford their meds, or any type of hospital stay. They’re not paying a premium for extra square footage and art on the walls.
Most patients can't afford the organised health insurance scam industry. That's where most of the money goes.
Ending that scam and asking patients to add an extra percent or two on their bills to pay for good food and a good environment would barely be a rounding error compared to the banditry that forces them to pay outrageous and unjustifiable fees for common meds and routine medical services - never mind specialised care.
Most health insurance has a profit margin in the vicinity of 10%. They introduce many problems into the healthcare market, but if you think they’re the reason people can’t afford healthcare, you are mistaken.
I don’t mean to sound snarky here, but: if you believe you can boil down one of the most fractured, complex, and heavily regulated industries (really, set of inter-related industries) in the country to a single “that group of assholes over there cause all the problems” bulletpoint, you have missed 99% of the story.
The wages of all the people working in health insurance don't appear as profit, but if you removed the industry all that money - and the rents - would be released. To recapitulate it's not just the profit, it's the entire sectors costs that you release by removing the need for that sector.
There would be incidental costs, like more unemployment, and possibly some more admin within the healthcare system; though from what I hear it would more probably reduce admin costs on the healthcare end too.
> Most health insurance has a profit margin in the vicinity of 10%.
Well, that's partially because they're legally required to spend 80% of premiums on patient care.
The end result is that higher premiums mean higher profits out of that fixed percentage of margin they're permitted to skim, so they don't fight cost increases too much - until people outright stop being able to afford the premiums, increases in them benefit the insurer's bottom line.
> Most health insurance has a profit margin in the vicinity of 10%. They introduce many problems into the healthcare market, but if you think they’re the reason people can’t afford healthcare, you are mistaken.
People see a lot of money flowing into insurers and hear about large profit numbers. That makes it feel like they're the obvious problem.
I've (anecdotally) noticed that people and candidates tend to refer to insurance costs, vs costs of the underlying. My perception is that they want "medical insurance" to really be a subsidy, not classic insurance.
Interestingly, this comment can be read as either pro-socialist or pro-free-market. In either case, it's plainly true. The cost has to be covered _somehow_. We should find a way to make it happen.
My politics aside - which on healthcare include both socialism and free market capitalism, to different degrees in different contexts - I really was just trying to communicate the straight fact, and I’m very appreciative of your recognition of that. In these discussions, it often seems like people assume that healthcare and associated amenities are created from thin air, and when less than ideal, are so due strictly to malice or indifference. Which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Don't get me wrong, I'm _very_ thankful for the fact I still have both my legs, but staying sane is extremely difficult.
Half of the bays on my ward literally had no windows. There were people around me that hadn't seen daylight in over a month. There wasn't any publicly accessible free WiFi, the TVs were costing over £40/week. There's no library, no social spaces and absolutely nothing to do. Even the staff are too busy to have a conversation with. You had two meals served 6 hours apart. It wasn't awful but certainly wasn't great. Even buying and eating a lot of my own food left me loosing a tonne of weight. And not a single accessible gym or swimming pool even close. Being able to get healthy and fit seems like a no-brainer.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good, but I find it impossible to believe this isn't causing more problems and actually increasing recovery times costing them more money over-all.